What will be in Perl 6?July 28, 2000

At O'Reilly's Open Source Conference in Monterey earlier this month,
Perl creator Larry Wall announced the start of work on Perl 6, a
complete rewrite of the language to address many of the social and
technical problems in Perl 5. This week, O'Reilly Network Publisher Dale
Dougherty talks with Perl.com managing editor Mark-Jason Dominus and
Perl Mongers director brian d foy about the announcement, its meaning, and the reaction of the Perl community.

"Larry really needed to devolve some of his moral authority onto other
people. I'm really glad to see that he's going to do that. Often he's
unavailable -- he was out for months while he was working for the Camel
(Programming Perl, 3rd Edition). And it's hard for the group to get
along without someone who's officially able to make a decision."

"For me, the most interesting part of the Perl 6 announcement was not
technical, but more about governance, if you will, or how the Perl
community will create its own process to create Perl 6. There was some
admission on one hand that the P5P process, the Perl Porters' list, its
loose structure really is inadequate for getting work done in a timely
fashion."